Build the right thing problem

Whether you are a business analyst, solution architect, or a product manager, there is something that unites us all. Building digital solutions is extremely difficult thing to get right.

By that I do not mean that the sheer act of birthing a digital solution is difficult. Quite the contrary. It is actually not difficult at all to build an application these days. With the rise of no-code, declarative solutions, you do not even need to know how to code to configure something useful for your users. Furthermore, with how quickly generative AI is advancing, there are some who question if there is even going to be a job for a 'coder' anymore.

No, building an application is not hard these days, and it is becoming easier and easier. What is however difficult is building something that actually adds value. If you dive into the data, the scale of the problem might frighten you.

Risk and waste in the world of commercial products

I am the VP of Product at Elements.cloud. It is a start-up that is trying to establish change intelligence as the product category for complex Enterprise systems. Ever since I joined the company, I was aware that joining a start-up is a high-risk undertaking.

You see, according to data, 90% of all start-ups fail to survive. Worth noting however, that this is among those start-ups that managed to get at least $1 million in funding. And among those that fail, the #1 cited reason is the lack of market need. In 42% of cases, failed startups created a product or service that didn’t meet a real felt need in the market. In other words, they built a solution nobody asked for or needed.

Even if you look at feature usage within a digital application, the amount of waste is staggering. 80% of features in an average commercial software product are rarely or never used. To put that into perspective, this has been estimated to be around $29.5 billion wasted on development that NEVER brought any value for their users.

As a VP of Product and a passionate product manager, these statistics haunt me almost every day. Imagine working with your development team for weeks, months, years, trying to deliver innovative solutions. Only to discover if you did nothing for 4/5 of the time, the result would be the same 😱😱😱

Photo by Kind and Curious on Unsplash

Internal IT is no better 

I know that many of my readers are business analysts and solution architects, responsible for managing internal business platforms like Salesforce, SAP, Oracle and others. You might be thinking this problem does not apply to you. I apologize for being the bearer of bad news - but you are just as at risk of wasting your time as your product management brethren.

As much as 26% of internal digital projects result in no sustainable value to the business. And consistently anything around 75% result in mediocre results and diluted value. To put those numbers into money, in 2018 $1.3 trillion was spent on digital transformations of business operations, and it was estimated that as much as $900 billion went to waste. The level of the overall digital transformation market is expected to grow to $3.3 trillion by 2025. If the historic rate of failure continues, by 2025 that would represent a $2.4 trillion waste. For comparison, the total bailout to US banks during and after the 2008 financial crisis was approximately $700 billion - nearly 3.42x less!

We lack industry wide statistics on feature adoption in internal IT applications. But let me share results of an internal review.

Photo by Jp Valery on Unsplash

Many years ago, we were evaluating adoption of our Salesforce Org. We went beyond just looking at daily and weekly logins - which were consistently showing 100% ‘adoption’ among employees. 

The purpose of the retrospective was to evaluate how much the custom capabilities delivered in the prior 12 months were adopted by the end users. We found that:

• Alliances team was only using 5% of the custom functionality built for them

• Finance team was only using 32% of the custom functionality built for them

• Sales team was only using 61% of the custom functionality built for them

• Product team (my department!) was using 88% of the custom functionality built for them

By our count, the admin team wasted 23% of their time and budget that year. And all of that within an Org that was showing great adoption and return on investment overall.

Build the right thing problem

The 'build the right thing' problem is a widely observed phenomenon in the software industry where solutions being delivered are not fit for purpose. It is not that they are built poorly or don't work. Instead, they are simply not useful to users' jobs to be done, and hence they end up not being used.

The problem arises when there's a gap in understanding or uncovering the full scope of the real requirements for a particular need. As a result, we spend resources on building something that, while potentially high-quality, is ultimately not what our users need.

This problem has existed for a long time. The comic below is but the hundredth re-design of the original cartoon. And while we share it in the software circles all the time and laugh about it, the problems continues to persist. And it all comes back to capturing the wrong requirements in the beginning.

Proper planning and analysis involve meticulous user research, user experience design, and feasibility studies. This process is essential for aligning product's features and functionalities with user needs and market demands. It also helps in setting achievable goals and preparing for potential risks and challenges.

The problem is that very few people actually do any research and analysis (or in any substantial degree) upfront. Feature requests are often taken at face value. The full scope of user's jobs to be done or user journeys are rarely captured and analyzed. The 'feature creep' creeps up on us, as we end up over-engineering and over-solutioning. And in the end, we end up not addressing our target users' real needs.

How to solve it?

Trying to solve the build the right problem has been my focus for many years. I have used many techniques over time in my research and analysis, each with its unique strengths and weaknesses. I have finally merged those techniques I found to be most valuable into a single, coherent methodology called "Total Story Visualization". It is an approach that combines jobs to be done, job mapping, user journey mapping, business process mapping, and others, into a single, syncretic approach. You can read more about it in my blog post.

But better yet, you can take my course and embark on this journey to transform your approach to building digital products, making them not just feasible, but successful and impactful.

Enroll in my masterclass in Total Story Visualization today.